BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Endless Appetite for Success Drives the Advertising World : WHERE THE SUCKERS MOON: An Advertising Story <i> by Randall Rothenberg</i> , Alfred A. Knopf, $25, 478 pages

Some people think that advertising exists purely to give you a chance to talk, eat or visit the bathroom during your favorite television show.

Some consider it technological brainwashing. Worst of all, some people buy it--then purchase whatever wares are being hawked, their critical faculties clouded by images that often have little to do with the product.

I remember when my daughter was barely 3 and she happened to see a TV commercial for a bank. She watched the stagecoach tear across the prairie and then proudly announced that she knew exactly what they were selling: horses.

Randall Rothenberg, former New York Times advertising columnist, has another take on the subject in his engrossing book, “Where the Suckers Moon.” As far as he’s concerned, advertising is the offspring of a marriage made in corporate hell--between often misguided and shortsighted clients and advertising executives in love with the oh-so-clever sound of their own voices.

He is blessed with a wonderful story: Rothenberg got Subaru of America to let him watch the company put its account up for review. The car company needed a new image; the agencies it chose to look at were all desperately eager for that jewel in an agency’s crown, the automotive account.

This may sound like a cut-and-dried business story, but that’s hardly the case. Leave it to human nature to make folly out of process whenever possible. What begins as a shopping expedition soon turns into the advertising equivalent of a trek through the Donner Pass.

The problem--ironic, given that this is a quest for communication--is that the folks at Subaru don’t always understand what their own ads are or aren’t doing for them. They talk about achieving “closure” with a candidate agency as though they were going through group therapy and not an account review--and then dismiss one agency because an executive there is baldfaced enough to admit just how badly he wants a car account. The Subaru executive is miffed: He wanted the executive to fall in love with Subaru, not with the category.

Rothenberg worked for two years collecting mountains of damning details. He is at his best when he has irresistible characters to play with. The exchange that introduces us to Malcolm and Harvey, the two men who want to sell anything and end up selling Subarus, reads like David Mamet on speed--all crass enthusiasm and random hunger for success.

Subaru’s Chris Wackman reads like a casualty from the very beginning--a decent all-American guy who seems to believe that he can reason his way to the right decision.

Not a chance. Subaru ends up with Weiden & Kennedy, the Portland, Ore., agency that inherited the mantle of hipness from the godfather of cool--L.A.’s Chiat/Day. To those of you who aren’t familiar with advertising, that’s kind of like asking Keanu Reeves to sell Brooks Brothers suits. It doesn’t compute.

Rothenberg, who seems to have managed the neat trick of being everywhere at once, gets his revenge for having had to write a just-the-facts newspaper column for many years. His style, at its best, is sly, just a bit snide and properly skeptical of the causal link between commercial and consumer purchase.

He also works hard to place his tale in a historical context. We get a concise and often unutterably funny explanation of how Subaru came to be in the first place. We get lessons in advertising theory; we even get commentary from ancient Greek philosophers.

Process books like this one are tough. If you don’t provide enough framework, they read like extended magazine pieces. But if you overcompensate, it’s easy to lose the rhythm of the narrative. Every now and then Rothenberg gets bogged down in his prodigious research and it’s hard not to think, but then what happened?

When his characters drive the story, his style is fluid. When he backs into exposition, the going gets a little slow.

Persevere. It pays off. By the end of “Where the Suckers Moon,” it becomes clear that advertising is neither an art nor a science, but an impossibly odd hybrid--a business based in persuasion. That’s what makes it so crazy, and so much fun to read about from the relative safety of the sidelines.